A promising, often entertaining debut soaked through with Texas flavors.
A closeted local politician, a beautiful college student with serious financial problems, a “fixer” with connections, and a mob goon race for treasure in this tense, Dallas-based novel by Lynch (Babylon 5, 2006, etc.).
College student Allison Kerry is working two summer jobs, struggling to save money for law school and help out her hapless brother and his critically ill son. Her ethics and tenacity are admirable—but when grocery bags containing packs of $100 bills fall off the roof of a blue Suburban and onto her beat-up Volkswagen’s hood, she decides to hold on to it rather than report it or find its rightful owner, despite a cryptic note in one of the bags. How did nearly $750,000 end up on the roof of that SUV? This question briskly sets the plot in motion. The SUV, it turns out, belongs to Bill Garrett, an unscrupulous political fixer who’s committed countless crimes. City councilman Billy Clayton misleads him into believing that they’re both being blackmailed by a giant construction company and that they must pay off another council member to ensure a stadium contract and avoid an intimidating mob enforcer named James Garrelli. But Clayton has a deeper secret: the married Texan likes to step out with men at a bar called Booty Scoot. When Garrelli puts a gun to Clayton’s head, makes him say “I’m a hick who likes dick,” and blackmails him with photos, he knows he needs Garrett’s help. Meanwhile, with the help of a stalwart neighbor, Allison attempts to evade and outwit everyone else. Overall, this story is well-paced with some suspenseful moments that sometimes verge on ludicrous; for example, at one point, an African-American council member calculates “reparations” he’s owed to the penny and demands a bribe of $746,841.03. The principal characters are credible throughout, but the story is marred by some cartoonish figures, such as a hit man who can’t hit straight, a backwoods animal caretaker who names animals after his exes so he’ll enjoy killing them, and a wife addicted to buying heirloom china on eBay.
A promising, often entertaining debut soaked through with Texas flavors.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61296-697-7
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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